<I don't recall any recent substantial discussion of religion on this page, but the goal is personal insults so perfidious brought up the subject in his standard attempt to be harsh, hurtful. It's what he does.

Proverbs 29:22
An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression.

Cormier lives across the pond (as far as I know) and does not make political statements. Oh, Cormier has been attacked on here (usually the kibitzer's cafe back when it still had activity) but Cormier chooses not to respond. He has also been attacked for posting computer chess analysis, which is not often. Most of the time, Cormier is ignored. Let's leave it that way.

More of the same otherwise, unnecessary personal attacks based upon pre-meditated labels. Lots of ugly people on this page doing the same thing day after day getting nowhere.

Of course, I enjoy getting the best of the narcistic [sic] perfidious. It just befuddles perd that he cannot buffalo me like he has other good people. perd is a big word hit-and-run specialist who can't stand toe-to-toe for debate.

Your rehearsed remarks to auto insult others don't apply <refused>. You only know of FTB because you blindly follow the perd's mean comments which are always meant to be hurtful. Truly, why would any good person want to follow such rabid negativity?

<Today we’re going to talk about why JD Vance is going to fail in his quest to inherit MAGA from Donald Trump. As is usually the case, professional wrestling is the best guide to our political reality.

1. Patrons

If you can’t force yourself to sit through JD Vance’s conversation with Ross Douthat, you should just watch Tim’s Cliff’s Notes version.

There’s a dark irony in Vance using Ross NeverTrump(?) Douthat1 and the woke New York Times as a vehicle for shoring up his position as the heir to MAGA. But also, it’s a revealing choice. Where Trump used Breitbart and Alex Jones to take over the Republican party by winning over the great unwashed, Vance has decided that his base is the conservative nomenklatura and that he can cement his claim to the throne with the support of Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, and Peter Thiel.

This isn’t as crazy as it might seem. In politics, there is an inside game and an outside game.

The outside game is popular support—it’s when a figure harnesses public sentiment to capture political power. The inside game is more about attaining power by mastering the elites. The two ur-examples here in politics are Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

In professional wresting there is also an ur-example. Let me tell you a story about Hulk Hogan and the Honky Tonk Man.

Roy Wayne Farris wrestled under the name Honky Tonk Man and his gimmick was that of a sweaty Elvis impersonator who hit people over the head with guitars.

In the mid-1980s, Honky Tonk worked in a Canadian promotion called Stampede Wrestling.

Honky Tonk was—in real life—a close friend of Hulk Hogan who at the time was the most powerful man in wrestling.

You know about Hogan. He’s the guy who took wrestling mainstream in the 1980s. Before Hogan, wrestling had been a regional subculture. Hogan transformed it into American pop culture. Because of Hogan, wrestling was on MTV and NBC. Wrestlers became movie stars. There were Saturday morning cartoons about wrestling; the aisles at Toys ‘R’ Us were filled with wrestling action figures.

During this period, the WWF was in the process of driving all of the regional promotions out of business as Vince McMahon (the owner of the WWF) and Hogan remade the industry into a monopoly.

As the top guy, Hogan exercised enormous influence over the WWF’s creative operations. If Hogan wanted to develop a storyline in a certain way, the company did it. If Hogan wanted to push a particular wrestler, the company did it. And if Hogan wanted to hire his buddies, the company did it.

Which is how the Honky Tonk Man came to be employed by the WWF in July of 1986.

Hogan liked having his friends around him, which is why the WWF of the 1980s had two kinds of stars.

There were sui generis stars, who were some of the greatest performers in the history of the business—Andre the Giant, Randy Savage, the Iron Shiek, Jake Roberts. And then there were Hulk Hogan’s buddies. This second group tended to be middling talents who kept the big guy happy on the road: Brutus Beefcake, the Nasty Boys, his IRL nephew Horace Hogan.

And the Honky Tonk Man.

Hogan convinced the WWF to hire Honky Tonk and position him as a face. Hogan pushed him behind the scenes and in the ring by cutting promos and telling fans to embrace him.

The problem was that the Honky Tonk Man couldn’t get over.

He was an average in-ring worker. His gimmick was silly. And he was a black hole of charisma.

For months the WWF pushed the Honky Tonk Man to the moon. But no matter how hard the company tried, the audience rebelled. People hated the character.

In an act of desperation, WWF started a write in campaign asking fans to give Honky Tonk a “vote of confidence.”

When that vote failed to materialize, the WWF didn’t fire Honky Tonk. They made him a heel.

Honky Tonk’s heel turn went somewhat better—his negative charisma worked in his favor when it came to making fans hate him. And Hogan kept pushing the WWF to promote him, even convincing them to give him the Intercontinental title, a traditional steppingstone to the top jobs in the company....>

<....But Honky Tonk’s weaknesses as a wrestler couldn’t be overcome with his heel gimmick. He was still just a replacement-level worker and his lack of creativity made him lean on cheap heat to stoke the audience’s disapproval.

After winning the Intercontinental belt, fans went from hating the Honky Tonk character in the normal way (what’s called heel heat) and gave him what is known in the business as “nuclear heat.”

When a heel character is working well in wrestling, he gets a passionate response from fans who love to hate him. But when a character tips over into nuclear heat, it means the audience no longer enjoys watching him get humiliated. It means that they resent his presence and disagree with the company’s decision to push the character. In Honky Tonk’s case, the audience didn’t want him to lose—they wanted him written off the show. They wanted the Honky Tonk Man to go away.

In 1991, after five years of trying to make the Honky Tonk Man happen, the WWF gave up and sent him on his way.

The lesson is that in wrestling, you can have the best inside game in the world—you can be friends with all the power players and be a good corporate soldier—but you have to be able to make the audience embrace you.

And if you can’t, then you have a hard ceiling.

2. Hillbilly

JD Vance is the Republican party’s Honky Tonk Man.

His base of power isn’t Republican voters, but Republican elites. He’s spent his entire adult life currying favor with more powerful patrons—progressing from Amy Chua, to David Frum, to Peter Thiel, to Tucker Carlson, and finally to Donald Trump’s children. Instead of making himself popular with voters, Vance chose to work the inside game. He targeted people with enough juice to give him the prizes he wanted.

This campaign worked. The vice presidency is the Intercontinental title of American politics.

Vance has changed gimmicks, too—going from media-friendly Never Trump intellectual, to paleocon darling, to try-hard MAGA troll. He’s changed his politics, his name, and even his religion in an attempt to get over with the crowd. Just like Honky Tonk.

They even have the same dead, close-set, beady little eyes.

His name is Beady-Eyes Vance. I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules.

Just like Honky Tonk, Vance has never been able to overcome his intrinsic limitations. He’s smug and inauthentic; self-involved and utterly humorless. As good as he is in a room with VC funders or Claremont groupies, he seems to have no idea how to act around normal human beings.

While his heel turn has gone better than his run as a babyface, Vance’s reliance on cheap heat (insulting women; pushing lies about immigrants eating pets) betrays a lack of political imagination. And his preference for the Ross Douthats of the world over the Alex Joneses suggests that Vance believes a populist base can be built on the support of political elites.

Meaning that whatever lip service Vance pays to MAGA populism, he still holds a pre-Trump view of the Republican party as a place where elites have the power to foist leaders on the rubes.

Vance’s path to the White House relies on the inside game. He has positioned himself not as someone able to defeat his rivals, but as the guy who can convince them not to run. You can imagine Vance telling Tucker or Don Jr. how much work being president is and how they don’t really want the headache. How he can get them everything they want out of the presidency without them having to put up with the hassle. How all they have to do is stand aside and let him do the dirty job of being president for them while they get all the perks.

That inside game worked for Mitch McConnell as leader of a Senate conference made up of fifty drab, rich fogies. It seems unlikely to work for a guy who wants to be Mussolini’s successor at the head of a column of nationalist fervor....>

<....3. Trumpism Is Maoism

We’re going to talk about this Drew Pavlou piece later in the week, so go read it right now:

In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong declared a jihad against the humble Eurasian tree sparrow.

Overnight, posters went up everywhere exhorting the Chinese to exterminate sparrows and other pests so as to ‘‘build happiness for ten thousand generations.’’

Hundreds of millions of Chinese were mobilised for the crusade. Mao himself demanded the enlistment of child soldiers, telling the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress: ‘‘The whole people, including five-year old children, must be mobilized to eliminate the four pests.’’

The sparrows were systematically hunted, burned and shot wherever they could be found. Millions terrorised them to their deaths, banging loud pots and drums near their nests until the frightened sparrows eventually dropped from the sky out of exhaustion. Others went out into the forests to climb trees and smash their eggs.

The societal mobilisation for this effort was total. Refusal to participate was tantamount to treason. Dutch historian Frank Dikotter found archival records showing at least one elderly man spent a month in confinement north of Beijing for failing to catch enough sparrows. All in all, up to two billion sparrows were slaughtered in a bloodbath of revolutionary fervour.

What on Earth motivated this maniacal crusade? Mao believed the tiny birds were robbing the Chinese people of their revolutionary gains by stealing the grain harvest. By wiping out the sparrow, Mao would ‘’conquer nature,’’ boosting grain yields to pay for the rapid forced industrialisation of China.

The only problem was that the sparrows hunted locusts. Free from their natural predators, locust populations exploded across China, blanketing the skies and devouring grain crops. The resulting famine killed at least 40 million people in a disaster of world-historic proportions.

Far from conquering nature, Mao and his regime were broken on its back; his fervent commitment to ideological purity and magical thinking in the face of science, reason and conflicting evidence brought about the single greatest economic policy disaster in the entirety of human history.

Trump’s Unique Pathologies

‘‘Chairman Mao is the reddest, reddest sun in our hearts’’ - Maoist Cultural Revolution era poster held by the Library of Congress

‘‘We can't just ignore the president's desires’’ - Vice President J.D. Vance

Like Chairman Mao, President Donald Trump subscribes to a wide range of bizarre crackpot theories about economics, politics and world affairs. And like the Great Helmsman, he too has managed to concentrate an extraordinary amount of power in his hands, building up an immense personality cult so as to terrify other figures in his party into submission.>

<As the first Supreme Court term of Donald Trump’s second presidency draws to a close, one particularly alarming throughline has emerged: The court’s decision in Trump v. U.S. nearly one year ago has emboldened the president to challenge the limits of judicial authority to their breaking point. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision granting Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution looked disastrous from the moment it was released in July 2024. Its impact has only grown more dire since then, as a string of emergency orders and late-night rulings from the court in response to Trump’s daily assaults on the Constitution makes plain. At the time, the most immediate consequence of Trump v. U.S. appeared to be its derailment of special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to try Trump for his attempted subversion of the 2020 election. And that outcome undoubtedly bolstered Trump’s successful campaign to retake the White House by taking a Jan. 6 trial off the table before November 2024.

But the more enduring ramifications only became clear after he reentered the White House in January. In the course of effectively exonerating Trump for his misdeeds, the Supreme Court endorsed a corrupt vision of the presidency in which self-dealing, partisan retribution, and abuse of power were reframed as legitimate, even laudable constitutional prerogatives of the chief executive. Trump’s second administration has, predictably, embraced this cynical conception of executive authority, with devastating results for democracy and civil liberties. In a matter of months, it has transformed the office of the president into a monarchical perch. Trump himself has weaponized the decision to assert unprecedented control over the government and exact unlawful retribution against its perceived enemies, in ways that even the majority probably did not foresee—from his successful efforts to bring major law firms under heel to his campaigns against Ivy League schools and student protesters, to his unlawful renditions of undocumented immigrants to a brutal Salvadoran prison under the false pretense that they are part of an invading army.

The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the court’s own power. Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment. In case after case since Trump’s restoration, the court has tried to have it both ways, reeling in some of his most extreme actions—while still giving the GOP most of what it wants—without entirely ceding its own power to tell the president “no.” And so a malignant dynamic is now unfolding between an imperial court and the president whom it crowned “a king above law.” The conservative supermajority continues to pursue its own agenda, which includes an aggressive expansion of executive authority. But it is doing so at the worst possible time, when the presidency has been captured by an aspiring authoritarian who defies all constitutional constraints. So the Supreme Court is caught between its own desire to shift the law rightward and its fitful inclination to shoot down Trump’s most extreme moves—if only to preserve its own power.

How did we get here? In retrospect, it should have been obvious that Chief Justice John Roberts would leverage the immunity case, Trump v. U.S., to expand presidential power. Roberts has long been a devotee of the “unitary executive theory,” the notion that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president almost absolute control over the entire executive branch. A growing mountain of evidence has proved that this theory is rooted in an egregious misreading of history, but the chief justice and his conservative colleagues have kept the faith. And they used Trump v. U.S. to pass off, as settled law, a set of deeply contested claims about near-dictatorial presidential power.

At the heart of the ruling, of course, was Roberts’ infamous declaration that the president may not be prosecuted for his “official acts” in office—that is, “actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” This supposed guarantee does not actually appear in the Constitution itself; Roberts largely made it up based on his own beliefs about how the government should operate. He then applied his newfound rule to Trump’s indictment, insulating him from charges that allegedly qualify as “official acts.” In the process, he decreed that a huge swath of Trump’s actions after the 2020 election—many the subject of his second impeachment—were, in fact, protected by Article 2....>

<....As Harvard Law’s Jack Goldsmith has detailed, Roberts then went much further: He declared that much of the president’s misconduct was not only immune from prosecution, but also from any kind of regulation or oversight by Congress or the courts. By doing so, the chief justice placed a patina of constitutional legitimacy over Trump’s conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, announcing that some of his most notorious abuses of office could not be halted or punished by the other branches, except through impeachment and removal. These novel claims, Goldsmith points out, were not even briefed by the parties or addressed by the lower courts. It appears that the chief justice simply spotted an opportunity to enshrine them into precedent and decided to shoot his shot. This rushed and reckless approach created a roadmap that Trump would easily exploit from the moment he returned to the White House.

Consider, for instance, how the ruling analyzes Trump’s meddling with the Department of Justice after the 2020 election. It acknowledges that the president and his allies pressed the agency to open criminal investigations into the voting procedures in key swing states that Joe Biden carried. Under this plan, the DOJ would pretend to uncover election fraud in these states, then urge their legislatures to create an “alternative slate” of electors who would cast their votes for the losing candidate, Trump. When then–acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen refused to go along with the scheme, Trump threatened to fire him. Smith’s indictment zeroed in on this scheme to support his allegation that the president engaged in an unlawful conspiracy to thwart Congress’ certification of the election.

But Roberts held that Trump’s demands for a sham investigation were constitutionally protected. Why? Because, he wrote for the court, the president has “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.” Roberts then reframed Trump’s invidious interference with the DOJ as a permissible exercise of executive authority. This kind of “decisionmaking,” he insisted, is “the special province of the executive branch,” and the president himself holds all “executive power.” He therefore holds “exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime.” He may also “discuss potential investigations and prosecutions” with subordinates—a euphemism for conspiring with loyalists to overturn the election. And he must have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates” for refusing to obey his will, no matter how corrupt or outright criminal.

It is unclear whether, when writing these passages, the chief justice realized he was blessing a shocking expansion of presidential power. The Justice Department has long operated with a substantial degree of independence from the White House to ensure that it wields its immense power free from partisan interference. President Richard Nixon notoriously breached this wall during Watergate, prompting both Congress and the DOJ itself to enact reforms that would insulate federal law enforcement from direct presidential control. Yet in Trump v. U.S., Roberts spurned the very principle of DOJ independence as an affront to the Constitution.

Georgetown Law’s Marty Lederman promptly flagged that holding as a “profound” shift in the law, one that will be “weaponized” by “executive branch lawyers and officials for time immemorial.” He also noted that this new rule is not limited to the Justice Department, but seemingly applies to all federal agencies, many of which have their own law enforcement operations. Roberts essentially decreed that Congress may no longer bar the president from corrupting these agencies by instructing them to open fraudulent investigations and lie to the public. That is, Lederman warned, “an extraordinarily radical proposition”—a loaded gun that an unscrupulous president could easily brandish to shoot down the rule of law....>

<....Which is exactly what Trump is now doing. Central to his consolidation of power since Jan. 20 has been his assertion of total control over the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies. And he has used this control to further his own campaign of retribution. Trump has, for example, ordered the DOJ to launch criminal probes into two first-term officials who publicly criticized him. (One target’s offense: Acknowledging that the 2020 election was free and fair.) Trump has issued a slate of executive orders against law firms that have hired or represented people he dislikes, instructing his administration to investigate and penalize them. He has unlawfully retaliated against news organizations whose speech he disapproves of. He has directed his administration to investigate and potentially punish universities that he views as overly liberal. And he has empowered his subordinates to imprison and attempt to deport student protesters on the basis of their protected free speech.

Trump has been able to do all this because he has torn down the traditional buffer between the White House and the Justice Department—with the eager assistance of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who views herself as the president’s personal lawyer. So, too, do Trump’s rotating cast of interim U.S. attorneys, including Ed Martin and Alina Habba, who believe it’s their job to carry out the president’s wishes by using the vast powers of their offices to target his political enemies and exonerate his friends. And why shouldn’t they? True, decades of institutional norms counsel against such interference on the grounds that the Justice Department serves the law, not the president. But the Supreme Court has now dismissed those customs as an encroachment upon executive power. It was inevitable that Trump would interpret its decision as permission to transform the Justice Department into an arm of his authoritarian project.

Nor does any of this stop at the Justice Department. Roberts’ endorsement of presidential removal power in Trump v. U.S. constituted, in Lederman’s words, a “stealth overruling” of a Supreme Court precedent upholding congressional restraints on the firing of law enforcement officials. One week into his second term, Trump exercised this power to illegally fire 17 inspectors general, violating congressional restrictions on the removal of these independent watchdogs. The move hobbled internal checks against fraud and abuse across agencies. But the courts did not stop it—after all, inspectors general perform law enforcement duties, a responsibility that SCOTUS pronounced to be “the special province” of the president. Trump and his allies have also asserted a broader and unprecedented right to purge much of the civil service, including prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. Trump’s DOJ threatened to clear out a U.S. attorney’s office until it could find someone who would corruptly suspend the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for purely political reasons.

Look closely, and you can see Trump v. U.S.’s impact all across the government. The president’s ability to suspend the TikTok ban, a ban that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld, derives from the chief justice’s declaration that the president alone can enforce, or not enforce, federal law. Trump’s top advisers are repurposing the Trump v. U.S. ruling to justify “impounding,” or refusing to spend, billions of dollars appropriated by Congress—something Congress has expressly prohibited. The government’s unlawful efforts to summarily deport migrants to a Salvadoran prison is also tied to the ruling: The Justice Department has proclaimed that, as president, Trump has inherent constitutional authority to deport immigrants without due process. For support, it has cited a passage in Trump v. U.S. granting the president expansive power over “matters related to terrorism” and “immigration.” The administration argues that this language, alongside Roberts’ other proclamations of executive control, prevents Congress and the courts from interfering with his mass deportation plans. For Trump, the ruling is the gift that keeps on giving.

But how does the Supreme Court feel about all this? Goldsmith is likely correct that the majority did not think through all the implications of its decision for a second Trump term. (Partly, it may have been a matter of haste; the court rushed out the monumental ruling in barely two months.) Roberts and his conservative colleagues also may not, for example, mind the firings of executive branch officials, since beefing up that power has been part of the conservative project for decades....>

<....SCOTUS, though, has blocked a number of moves that Trump undertook based, at least in part, on his administration’s interpretation of Trump v. U.S. The court forced the Department of State to pay out $2 billion in foreign aid that the government tried to impound. It ordered the government to attempt to retrieve a migrant who was mistakenly deported (a ruling the executive branch continues to defy). It halted the late-night removal of Venezuelan migrants then ruled that their due process rights had been violated. Roberts himself has rebuked Trump’s call for the impeachment of judges who rule against him.

Yet this pushback is intermittent and often half-hearted, reflecting an ambivalent attitude to the precedent-shattering president. Although the court did ultimately protect Venezuelan migrants from summary deportations, it first gave the administration a technical victory lifting a restraining order that had halted their removal. Its decision in favor of the wrongly deported migrant also struck a pose of compromise, deferring to the executive branch’s primacy over foreign affairs—creating a loophole that the government has used to disregard its order. The court seems unlikely to uphold Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship, but may split the baby by rolling back the nationwide injunctions that are the sole thing keeping the policy on hold. And while just last week it blessed his firings of independent agency heads, it tried to preemptively carve out an exception to its ruling that prohibits him from taking over the Federal Reserve, clearly an area of special concern to the court.

The majority seems at once delighted that Trump is creating opportunities to shift the law rightward yet distraught that he sometimes pushes to the point of encroaching on the court’s own power. Its solution, for now, is to continually stake out middle ground when conflicts between the two branches’ agendas arise. By doing so, the court is all but encouraging the administration to test, if not blow past, the limits of its own decisions. It has repeatedly endorsed the president’s interpretation of Trump v. U.S. as a near-boundless grant of executive authority. No one should be surprised when Trump concludes that the bounds of his power extend well beyond the Supreme Court’s own rulings.

There is a deep irony at the root of this emerging conflict. No institution played a bigger role in handing Trump the power he is now abusing than the Supreme Court itself. Now, after paving his path back to the White House and dismantling limitations on his power, SCOTUS appears increasingly uncomfortable with how he is using his authority. Its concerns may arise in no small part from the fear that the Trump administration is sapping the judiciary of its strength, defying courts’ orders, and treating their decisions as advisory at best. Some of the conservative justices may be perturbed that the White House is effectively demoting the judiciary from a co-equal branch of government to a bothersome layer of bureaucracy that can be overridden or ignored. If so, the blame for surrendering the court’s legitimate claim to equal authority falls squarely on the court’s own shoulders.>

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "6"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Duong, Thanh Nha"]
[Black "Knecht, Mark"]
[ECO "D46"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 e6 4.Qc2 Nf6 5.g3 Nbd7 6.Bg2 Bb4+ 7.Bd2 Bxd2+ 8.Nbxd2 O-O 9.O-O b6 10.e4 dxe4 11.Nxe4 Nxe4 12.Qxe4 Bb7 13.Rfd1 Qc7 14.Ne5 Rac8 15.Qf4 Nf6 16.Rac1 Rfe8 17.g4 c5 18.dxc5 Bxg2 19.Kxg2 Nxg4 20.Qxg4 Qxe5 21.cxb6 axb6 22.Qd4 Qxd4 23.Rxd4 Red8 24.Rcd1 Rxd4 25.Rxd4 Kf8 26.Rd6 Rxc4 27.Rxb6 Ra4 28.a3 Ke7 29.Rb7+ Kf6 30.Kf3 e5 31.Ke3 Rh4 32.b4 Rh3+ 33.f3 Rxh2 34.a4 Ra2 35.a5 Ke6 36.Rb6+ Kd5 37.Rb7 1/2-1/2>

<mawdicker>, fight your private little war elsewhere.

Capisce, <fredwuckfad>?

<When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its controversial 6-3 decision in Trump v. the United States, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was downright scathing in her dissent.

The High Court's right-wing supermajority ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed in office but not for unofficial acts. And Sotomayor, in her dissent, warned that that under the ruling's guidelines, a president could order the assassination of a political rival and claim it was an official act and therefore, exempt from criminal prosecution.

In Sotomayor's view, the Trump v. the United States decision gave the federal government's executive branch way too much power. And in an article published by Slate on May 27, journalist/attorney Mark Joseph Stern argues that the High Court — four months into Donald Trump's second presidency — is imperiled by its own ruling.

"As the first Supreme Court term of Donald Trump’s second presidency draws to a close," Stern explains, "one particularly alarming throughline has emerged: The Court's decision in Trump v. U.S. nearly one year ago has emboldened the president to challenge the limits of judicial authority to their breaking point. The Supreme Court's 6–3 decision granting Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution looked disastrous from the moment it was released in July 2024. Its impact has only grown more dire since then, as a string of emergency orders and late-night rulings from the Court in response to Trump's daily assaults on the Constitution makes plain."

Stern continues, "At the time, the most immediate consequence of Trump v. U.S. appeared to be its derailment of special counsel Jack Smith's effort to try Trump for his attempted subversion of the 2020 election. And that outcome undoubtedly bolstered Trump's successful campaign to retake the White House by taking a January 6 trial off the table before November 2024."

The High Court's six GOP-appointed justices, Stern argues, shot themselves in the foot in Trump v. the United States — and now, they're paying the price.

"The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the Court's own power," Stern laments. "Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment. In case after case since Trump's restoration, the Court has tried to have it both ways, reeling in some of his most extreme actions — while still giving the GOP most of what it wants — without entirely ceding its own power to tell the president 'no.' And so, a malignant dynamic is now unfolding between an imperial court and the president whom it crowned 'a king above law.'"

Stern adds, "The conservative supermajority continues to pursue its own agenda, which includes an aggressive expansion of executive authority. But it is doing so at the worst possible time, when the presidency has been captured by an aspiring authoritarian who defies all constitutional constraints. So, the Supreme Court is caught between its own desire to shift the law rightward and its fitful inclination to shoot down Trump's most extreme moves — if only to preserve its own power.">

<A defiant statement read aloud by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is drawing mockery for its apparent lack of basic constitutional understanding as she lashed out against a unanimous court ruling that struck down President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs as illegal.

Despite the U.S. Constitution specifically granting Congress purview over tariffs and trade, Leavitt told reporters on Thursday that the "courts should have no role here."

Leavitt also decried what she called the "troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges, inserting themselves into the presidential decision making process," while claiming that "America cannot function if President Trump or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive, diplomatic, or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges" who are "threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage."

She also insisted that "for the sake of our Constitution and our country" the U.S. Supreme Court must step in.

The Press Secretary also claimed that President Donald Trump's "rationale was legally sound," while the court engaged in "judicial overreach."

"Using his full proper legal authority, President Trump imposed universal tariffs and reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day to address the extraordinary threats to our national security and economy posed by large and persistent annual U.S. Goods trade deficits," she said—a claim with which the court disagreed.

Critics blasted Leavitt's remarks.

"This is flat-out nonsense," wrote The Atlantic's James Surowiecki, who previously wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker. "No one is stopping Trump from engaging in trade negotiations. What he's been stopped from doing is imposing tariffs that he has no legal or constitutional authority to impose. Stopping illegal and unconstitutional action is precisely the courts' role."

"If Trump imposed a national sales tax by presidential fiat, the courts would of course be required to step in to stop him," continued Surowiecki, who is also the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds."

"The same is true of him imposing a 10% universal tariff on every country in the world, along with arbitrary tariffs on top of that," he wrote.

"Leavitt says the US trade deficit is an 'extraordinary' problem, then in the next breath says we've run an annual trade deficit every year since 1975 - meaning it's not, in fact, extraordinary," he added.

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick appeared to take aim at Leavitt's grasp of the U.S. Constitution.

"The courts should have no role in interpreting a law? Really?" he asked. "I don't know what country Leavitt thinks she lives in, but it's not this one.">

<Since the start of his second term in office, US president Donald Trump has cultivated a political atmosphere that discourages freedom of thought. He also actively villainises and punishes any dissenting opinion. Worryingly, this atmosphere looks like it is spreading across other democracies.

Commentators have described Trump as both narcissistic and authoritarian. Yet, running parallel to these factors, one character trait is glaringly common among Trump supporters: sycophancy.

You just have to examine the pre-election rhetoric of Trump loyalists. One backer, Stephen Miller, declared him “the most stylish president … in our lifetimes”. Miller is now deputy White House chief of staff.

And South Dakota governor Kristi Noem gifted Trump a four-foot Mount Rushmore replica – with Trump’s face added alongside the original four presidents. Noem, who is now secretary of homeland security, epitomises the elevation of loyal sycophants over those with arguably better credentials.

Research has examined the dangers of sycophantic behaviour in the workplace, finding it reduces peer respect and morale, and leads to dissonance and lower productivity.

Other research has shown that someone who chooses to employ these tactics can enjoy improved promotion prospects, rewards such as the first refusal on business trips, easier access to company resources and a higher salary compared to their peers. But studies have also shown sycophants often suffer emotional exhaustion from the dual stresses of manipulation and responsibility.

Ongoing research I (Neil) am doing on workplace sycophancy reveals similar patterns. Interviews, spanning from junior staff to CEOs, show reduced motivation, falling team morale and declining respect for sycophants.

One participant highlighted the effect on teamwork that sycophantic behaviour can have within the workplace.

Sycophancy means raising yourself in somebody’s esteem, at the expense of somebody else, on the ladder. And so… it’s going to impact upon on the ability to be part of a team.

Another participant offered a comparison to a different deviant workplace behaviour – intimidation.

I’d say that sycophantic behaviour is coming into the same category as bullying. And it’s hard sometimes, especially with bullying and sycophantic behaviour, you are dealing with a lot of people that are manipulative, and manipulating people are quite charismatic. And when you’re charismatic, you’re more believable because you’re a storyteller.

One solution that emerges from the research is workforce education – teaching employees to recognise and mitigate a culture of ingratiation.

As an employee, many people might find it difficult not to bow to peer pressure. If the senior colleague encourages and rewards those who suck up, how do other colleagues, who do not choose to utilise such tactics, compete?

Another factor to consider is the tendency for some workers to “kiss up and kick down”. What this means is that staff who are lower down the hierarchical ladder suffer detrimental treatment from the colleagues who are trying to suck their way up the same ladder....

....Perhaps the most insidious aspect of sycophancy is the push for conformity when it comes to opinions. If leadership hears nothing but agreement, dangerous ideas can be reinforced. Things like the leader’s own skills or the competence of the organisation as a whole can become wildly exaggerated – with disastrous consequences.

When leaders are surrounded by “yes-men”, they’re deprived of critical input that could challenge assumptions or highlight potential flaws. This can lead to cognitive entrenchment where decision-makers become overconfident and resistant to change. Bad decisions then proceed unchecked, often escalating into systemic failures.

In return, this can lead to groupthink, a phenomenon where a desire for harmony overrides rational evaluation. Environments that suffer from groupthink often ignore red flags, silence whistleblowers and overvalue consensus. All of these things are damaging to an organisation’s ability to remain agile and competitive.

Which brings us back to Trump. In his case this isn’t a corporate crisis. It’s a geopolitical one. At stake is not shareholder value but national security and global stability.

With sycophants backing poor decisions, the risk ranges from damaged diplomacy to outright conflict. If loyalty replaces truth, the cost could be catastrophic. Trump’s regime may ultimately collapse under the weight of its own delusions – but the collateral damage could be profound.>

<It’s called extortion

Despite claims by the Defense Department to the contrary, legal teams representing the U.S. and Qatari governments have not finalized an agreement for transferring the luxury Boeing 747-8 jetliner that President Donald Trump wants for Air Force One amid outstanding requests by Qatar for Washington to clarify the transaction’s terms, said officials familiar with the matter.

Qatar is insisting that a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Doha specify that the aircraft’s transfer was initiated by the Trump administration and that Qatar is not responsible for any future transfers of the plane’s ownership, these people said.

If any of you have heard me on the radio or podcasts the last couple of weeks, you’ve heard me say this. He ordered the plane. They didn’t gift it. Steve Witkoff went over to Qatar and asked them about it, they flew it to Palm Beach, Trump toured it and said, “I’ll have that one.” There was never a question that they would give it to him. They’re not stupid.>

<Wall Street has a new shorthand about President Donald Trump — and he’s not happy about it.

Traders have reportedly come up with the acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out,” to take advantage of the trade environment created by the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries, and then backing off at the last moment.

He bristled when asked about it Wednesday in an Oval Office press conference.

“Don’t ever say what you say, that’s a nasty question,” Trump told a journalist who asked for his response to the acronym. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”

Trump rejected the idea that his reversals on tariffs amounted to him backing down, saying that usually receives a different critique.

“They will say oh he was chicken, he was chicken, that’s so unbelievable,” Trump said about the EU tariff extension, adding, “I usually have the opposite problem — they say you’re too tough!”

The “TACO” trades, first coined by the Financial Times, are one of the ways Wall Street has managed to profit from the chaos of the Trump administration.

Just a week after “Liberation Day,” in which he announced sweeping global tariffs, Trump abruptly announced they would all be cut down to a baseline 10 percent. His whopping 145 percent “retaliatory” tariff against China, part of a tit-for-tat escalation that has calmed after both countries struck a deal, is now down to 10 percent.

And just last week, Trump announced that he was considering increasing a tariff for the European Union to 50 percent, only to reverse course days later by extending the tariff deadline into July.>

<President Donald Trump reacted to the U.S. Court of International Trade ruling against his tariffs Thursday in a 506-word social media rant, saying that the judges who issued the ruling have done "damage" to the United States. Trump said Leonard Leo, a conservative legal activist who serves on the board of the Federalist Society, "controls" the judges of the Supreme Court and is a "sleazebag" and a "bad person."

"The U.S. Court of International Trade incredibly incredibly ruled against the United States of America on desperately needed Tariffs but, fortunately, the full 11 Judge Panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Court has just stayed the order by the Manhattan-based Court of International Trade," Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night.

"Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of 'TRUMP?'" the president wrote.

"What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges," he continued. "I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real 'sleazebag' named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions."

Trump went on to say Leo "openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court."

"I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten! With all of that being said, I am very proud of many of our picks, but very disappointed in others," he added.

Social media users reacted to the president's statement, saying that he was trying to go against the law.

Politico reporter Adam Cancryn wrote on the social platform X: "After staying silent on the tariff court rulings all day, Trump drops a stemwinder of a Truth going after, among others: the judiciary, Democrats, 'real sleazebag’ Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, 'backroom hustlers’ and other countries 'treating us unfairly.'"

"Trump is now calling Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society a sleazebag. He said he trusted him and all he got was lousy judges. If Trump would stop trying to get around the law, he may win more. He doesn’t want to follow the law, he wants to break it." wrote another user.

"He's being sued by Leo!" said a user.

"Isn’t Leonard Leo responsible for giving Trump the conservative judges he so desperately needs to keep his agenda in play?" wrote another X account.>

<Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is a reverse-Robin Hood nightmare. It steals from the poor to give to the rich. The 1,038-page version that passed the House will also balloon the deficit by nearly $4 trillion.

The Trump tax bill achieves this feat by extending (and in many cases expanding) tax breaks for the richest Americans, while at the same time depriving more than 10 million Americans of health insurance and regular access to their doctors, by axing $880 billion from Medicaid. It also increases red tape for Obamacare, while allowing other subsidies to lapse, boxing millions more out of their insurance.

The bill is regressive as a matter of tax policy. It will reduce the take-home incomes of bottom 10 percent of income earners by four percent by the end of the decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects. Penn Wharton, Trump's alma mater, finds that most households earning less than $51,000 will immediately see their after-tax income decrease. Meanwhile, the bill boosts the incomes of the top one percent by nearly $70,000 in the first year alone, giving that elite cohort a collective $124 billion net tax cut.

The Trump bill sorta makes good on Trump's campaign sales gimmicks - offering temporary, three-year tax breaks on tips (cost: $40 billion); the extra income earned from overtime ($124 billion); and auto loan interest ($58 billion); while also offering a tax credit to seniors, meant as an offset of taxes on Social Security income ($72 billion).

But as passed by the House, the tax bill also has many ugly provisions. Some are related to taxes, like the abolition of taxes on gun silencers, or ending tax incentives for clean energy and cars. Others are just completely extraneous, like language prohibiting state- and local regulation of artificial intelligence for 10 years.

Below is a survey of seven terrible tricks up the sleeves of the Big Beautiful Bill:

1) Undermining the Rule of Law

A provision slipped into the House bill, unrelated to taxes, would have a major impact on the courts and the rule of law. It blocks any funding to enforce contempt of court orders. This, in turn, could enable the Trump administration to flout the rulings of judges without consequence. Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of law as the University of California, is sounding the alarm that this is an affront to the basic functioning of our democracy. He writes in a post at Just Security that "nothing could be done" to enforce injunctions against the executive branch were this provision to become law - "even when the government had been found to violate the Constitution." In fact, he adds, "the greatest effect of adopting the provision would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable." These concerns are ripe because the Trump administration's countless illegal executive orders and actions keep getting turned back in court, and the administration's compliance - as with falling to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the gulag in El Salvador, as directed by the Supreme Court - has been irregular at best.

2) Rewarding Rich Homeowners

Rich people in blue states have cause to laud the Big Beautiful Bill. It quadruples a tax break that one analysis finds "Overwhelmingly Benefits Wealthy, White Households." We are talking here about the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. The tax break has some logic. It is intended to keep folks from having to pay federal taxes on the tax dollars they owe to governments closer to home. The 2017 Trump tax bill limited the deductibility of these payments - once unlimited - to $10,000, to help pay for its sweeping tax cuts for the rich and corporations. That partially preserved a break that's a boon to middle-class homeowners in blue states with high property taxes, including the Northeast or the West Coast, while stripping it from the vacation home and private-school set.

High earners in states from New Jersey to California have since bridled against the SALT deduction limit, arguing it's a form of double taxation, and have won over political allies in both parties. Inside the House GOP, a group of lawmakers calling themselves the "very salty" five held up the Trump bill until the SALT deduction was boosted to $40,000 and made available to couples earning up to half-a-million dollars a year....>